A hugely entertaining novel about the art of stand up comedy, This
is Your Life was a runaway bestseller in England. O'Farrell's hero,
Jimmy Conway, starts out the novel at the London Palladium. He is
about to perform his stand up comedy routine in front of two
thousand invited guests and millions more watching the event live
on TV. He steps out blinking into the spotlights and waits for the
applause to die down. He tries to appear confident but he can't
help wondering whether he should have shared his little secret with
someone by now. Jimmy has never performed any stand up before -
ever.
Conway, a nondescript thirtysomething with a long-faded dream of
telling jokes in public, starts the proceedings at the lowest point
in his life - teaching school, spending his evenings with a old and
grizzled collection of barroom bores (including his ex-girlfriend
Nancy) and generally feeling miserable over never having gotten his
one lucky break.
Things take a turn for the better when a local comedy legend, Billy
Scrivens, with whom Conway has exchanged a fragment or two of
small-talk while out running, drops down dead. Interviewed on
television, where he is plausibly represented as the deceased's
jogging companion, Jimmy suddenly discovers a tiny chink in the
door of the closely guarded gateway to fame and celebrity. After
snatching a ticket to Billy's funeral (paid for by the UK
equivalent of People Magazine, and awash with the rich and famous)
he convinces a gullible journalist that he is the latest
underground comedy sensation, a performer so principled that he
shuns TV and restricts himself to unscheduled appearances at
out-of-the-way clubs. A stack of forged reviews from a phantom
American tour does the rest. Courtesy of a rave profile in a
national newspaper, his career takes off.
The subsequent rollercoaster ride whisks him all the way from a
best new stand-up comedy award (where his acceptance speech loss of
nerve - "Look, there's been a terrible mistake" - is taken as a
riotous gag) to a dullard contribution to a nationally syndicated
television show, and even a lucrative ad campaign. Success,
inevitably, has its downside: the girls are too eager even for
sex-starved Jimmy, and the pub regulars are over-awed by his sudden
success.
Which all leads to Jimmy's big night at the Palladium, an ingenious
finish where the carpet is pulled from beneath Jimmy's feet, which
is credit to O'Farrell's resourcefulness, and his relish of the
comic twist and detour.